WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈

Chapter 65

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Negotiation (1)

My head hurt.

It wasn't just an ordinary headache. I could feel my own capillaries bursting, unable to handle the violent flood of information pouring in through my eyes.

Damn it. Blood's streaming out of my eyes and nose alike.

Bad enough to bring back memories of the days I spent running from Blasphemia.

The pain built up by my eyes hurt worse than getting electrocuted by the lightning inside Lord Thunderknell's body.

'Still, even so, this beats the time I fought Blasphemia to the death out in the desert....'

I looked down at the orb in my hand.

Inside the brilliant golden orb, I could glimpse a ceaseless, swirling current of lightning. The result of sealing it forcibly, without ever stabilizing it properly.

But none of that power leaked outward. The membrane of silver thread absorbed the lightning, straining to burst at any moment, and circulated it back inside.

Every time that strange cycle completed, the silver threads wrapped around the orb writhed.

It looked, for all the world, like something still alive and moving.

If I thought of this orb as one giant eye, the condensed lightning inside would be the iris, and the clinging silver threads, I supposed, the blood vessels.

'This isn't a proper finished product.'

This wasn't what I'd originally intended, forcing two living things into a precarious balance against each other like this.

What I wanted was performance exactly on par with the original Talisman of Thunderknell. No more, no less.

Compared to the original Talisman of Thunderknell, adding the silver-thread worm had probably boosted things like the raw-mana-to-mana conversion speed considerably.

But use this thing wrong, and it'd eat your body alive with silver thread, or fry you with leaking electricity. Hadn't it turned into exactly that?

'No good. I'll have to take this to Karisia and get her to sort it out.'

I tucked the Thunderknell Orb away inside my coat and turned around.

Fixers approaching from a distance, and Toress Magic Tower's mages, trembling where they stood.

How was I supposed to deal with this?

* * *

Lugret watched the man tuck the ominous orb away inside his coat.

From the moment he'd stepped up to Lord Thunderknell's feet, one possibility she'd been quietly thinking 'maybe' about had risen to the surface of her mind.

That grinning man might not be a mere Blasphemia agent.

They didn't operate like that. Blasphemia's agents, working to preserve the Ten Towers and keep the system intact, favored proven methods, stable ones, in other words.

She could say that with confidence. She'd been a Blasphemia agent herself, once.

That near-madness he'd just shown, that recklessness...

'An apocalypticist.'

People who could scatter flame to destroy the world and still laugh even as it burned them alive too. Only people like that, having made a choice that catastrophic, could still...

laugh.

The clothes of the man who'd stood in the heart of the thunder moments ago were scorched here and there. Beneath the burned, torn fabric, not a single part of his body was left unhurt.

And yet the faint smile at the corner of his mouth never faded.

The blood trickling from his eyes was probably a side effect of magic pushed past its limits. The grinning man raised a hand and wiped his face. Cleaned of blood, his face looked less clean than pale, or maybe just blurred.

A strange impression, as if he might evaporate at any moment even while she watched him directly.

Looking around, Lugret sensed at once that Toress Magic Tower's mages had already lost the will to resist. They must have decided there was no point standing against a mage terrifying enough to single-handedly end a fight between two colossal beasts that had looked more like a natural disaster.

The part of her that followed 'the cause' sounded an alarm. That thing shouldn't exist in this world.

She had to bring him down here, no matter what.

She traced back through the situation, slowly. At this point, it was impossible for a single mage to have developed a spell to control the silver-thread worm on his own. From obtaining a silver-thread sample to the time it would take, everything was lacking.

Which meant he must have learned the spell from someone, or something.

Even within Argyrion, only a limited number of people handled the silver-thread worm. If anyone had approached seeking to learn the control spell, a record should exist. And naturally, no mage matching that man's description existed within Argyrion.

If it wasn't independent development, and it wasn't a leak from within Argyrion, then the only route left by which he could have learned the control spell was Blasphemia.

A cold fear welled up in Lugret. An apocalypticist, infiltrated not into some minor subcontracted outfit, but into Blasphemia itself?

Hiding his true colors so perfectly he'd been trusted with cutting-edge classified magic?

While she suppressed her fear and searched for a chance to attack, the grinning man turned his gaze toward Toress Magic Tower's side.

"Everyone at Toress Magic Tower. You have gone too far. Not content with joining hands with the mastermind behind the Elysion terror attack, you've caused a magical disaster like this on top of it."

Still keeping up his imitation of Blasphemia, the lecturing tone of what he'd just said amounted, in effect, to a death sentence for Toress Magic Tower.

Lugret saw a glimmer of hope in that provocative declaration. Push people too hard, and there's bound to be backlash.

Summary execution was the standard principle for enemies of the Ten Towers. But would Toress Magic Tower, seduced by the Ten Commandments to the point of joining hands with Argyrion, really die quietly?

Right now, the mages were still overwhelmed by the sheer dominance the grinning man had just displayed. But if they broke free of that fear and thought about it even a little rationally, casting magic on that scale should have cost him an enormous amount of mana.

If they realized that and started resisting, they might just be able to stop that vile apocalypticist.

The grinning man's gaze shifted past the mages, toward what lay behind them.

"Fixers and mercenaries, all of you, did you sign your contracts knowing that Toress Magic Tower had allied itself with Argyrion, a group of traitors to the Ten Towers?"

Lugret grasped the grinning man's intent.

"I am an agent dispatched by the Ten Towers, and I hold the authority to render summary judgment over the current situation involving Argyrion. If you want any consideration given to the circumstances, show it through your actions."

The grinning man had no intention of confronting Lugret and Toress Magic Tower's mages himself.

He meant to let the fixers and mercenaries, who'd fled all across the island of Crete, finish the job with their own hands.

'This scheming...!'

Eliminating him was out of the question now. If she'd still had the full reserve of mana boosted by the blessing, maybe, but in her current state, facing down that apocalypticist on top of the fixers and mercenaries would be suicide, plain and simple.

A cold blade sank into Lugret's back just as she moved to flee.

"Guh-!"

"P-please, just spare me! I'll tell you anything I know!"

The one trembling and bowing low to Ortes was Smitia.

The Toress Magic Tower mage who'd served as the interviewer for the Crete excavation team.

* * *

The moment Smitia stabbed Lugret and threw their own body flat to the ground, Toress Magic Tower's other mages followed suit, begging only to be spared.

The reason for their sudden about-face was simple. The mage with the highest authority among those dispatched to the island of Crete had already been burned to death by Lord Thunderknell.

The mages still left standing were either ones pushed so far out of the internal politics that they hadn't even been allowed near the moment of Lord Thunderknell's excavation, or ones who'd fled from Lord Thunderknell in the deep layer.

They were people who knew, better than anyone, that they could never bring down Lord Thunderknell even if they died and came back a hundred times over.

Rather than stand against the mage who'd defeated Lord Thunderknell, it was better to sell out their colleagues and superiors and pin their hopes on a future where they might live even a little longer.

Behind the mages prostrating themselves flat on the ground, fixers and mercenaries stood with weapons trained on them. Ortes raised a hand and stopped them.

"Good. Then tell me everything, down to the last detail, exactly how this happened."

* * *

"...That is how it happened."

It was Ortes's report, back from his business trip. On the hologram screen Karisia had playing, an emergency notice scrolled by, announcing that an official extermination order had been declared against Toress Magic Tower.

"So the silver-thread worm went on a rampage and wrecked the comm relay... and you gathered up everyone who was left on the island of Crete, handed them off to the nearest Magic Tower, and came back. That's what you're saying?"

"Yes. I tried contacting Blasphemia to hand off the cleanup, but the communications equipment wasn't working properly. There was nothing else to be done."

Saying that, Ortes went on with his explanation.

To avoid being tracked, he hadn't visited the Magic Tower directly, using a fixer as a messenger instead. While leaving word for them to come collect the Toress Magic Tower personnel he'd left bound on the city's outskirts, he'd used a Blasphemia Inspector's identity, so there was nothing to worry about, and so on.

Karisia pointed at the mail log displayed on Ortes's gauntlet-type communicator.

"And what is this?"

"Ah. That's the conversation log with the priest of Enyalios I'd lined up earlier. A text came in while I was waiting on the city's outskirts to hand over Toress's mages."

『I don't know how the vote's going to go. It seems the Order of the Divine Name thinks it's more rational to just leave Argyrion alone, as long as it keeps the Ten Towers' eyes averted.』

『There's doubt going around, too, about whether you're really the prophet of Phoibos. Some think you might be a spy planted by the Ten Towers.』

『Only someone who's actually met you in person could sense the aura unique to a prophet. It's shameless of me to even ask, but if you could show some proof that you really are the prophet....』

Proof of being the Prophet of Phoibos meant, in short, a prophecy. Ortes gave a single shrug.

"I told him an extermination order would soon come down on Toress Magic Tower, on charges of allying with Argyrion. I actually thought he might suspect it was information I could only have gotten as a Blasphemia insider, but fortunately, it seems to have gone over well."

It couldn't help but land well. The alliance between Toress Magic Tower and Argyrion was something even Blasphemia hadn't known about.

"The Order of the Divine Name will likely make its stance on Argyrion clear soon enough. But there is still some time left before the order's vote wraps up. In the meantime, I will revisit the matter of recruiting Lampades."

* * *

The fixers climbing back up from the ruin's deep layer slowly divided up what food remained.

Their bodies were exhausted, but their minds stayed sharp.

The quality of the air had changed. They'd reach the surface soon!

The ones who'd found Outis's shed skin had already been stuck in the deep layer for hours now, maybe even days.

At first, they too had tried to make it straight back to the surface. But just as they carefully began feeling their way forward through the passage.

KRAKOOM! AAAAAAAGH!

A dissonant noise, half rolling thunder and half human scream, tangled together and reached them faintly from somewhere far off. Then the entire deep layer shook, followed by the sound of something collapsing.

It wasn't hard to guess the whole story. Just as Outis had prophesied, something terrible had been unleashed.

The unleashed disaster was sweeping people away. The fixers had survived only because they'd been cut off in the dark.

But at the same time, the path they'd meant to take out was now blocked. If they used magic, they could probably force the rubble aside, but...

Traps might be hiding among the rubble. And they were too afraid of being caught in the grip of whatever 'something' might come chasing after the sound of magic to dare move at all.

The roaring died away, and silence stretched on. After going through two meals in the dark, the fixers resolved to climb back up to the surface.

They didn't mean to head back through the passage they'd originally used to explore the deep layer. There was no telling what that place, the epicenter of the prophecy, might have turned into.

They put their full skill as ruin explorers to work, planning to skirt around the collapsed passage and carve out a new path. Dying slowly in the dark wasn't the fixer way. Challenging fate to the very last was.

"I see it! I see light!"

The comrade in the lead shouted it out. Even the fixers who'd been reinforcing the passage behind them to keep it from collapsing rushed forward and joined in smashing through the earth.

At last, brilliant sunlight soaked into their hair.

As the fixers savored the open air of the surface, they looked around. Something was off. The signs of destruction, they could make sense of, at least.

But there wasn't a trace of another living presence anywhere.

They could have searched the whole island of Crete and found no sign of a single person. One of them murmured, dazed.

"Outis (Ουτις)...."

A being whose very name meant 'nobody at all.'

But not even that 'anybody' remained anywhere on the island of Crete.

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